User blog:Flanqer/Translating the JCE
For a while now, I've been spending some of my spare time trying to translate the JCE. I started by downloading the original Japanese pages to my hard drive, converting them to UTF8 encoding (making them easier to process with Unix commands), and stripping the Javascript. I keep these as my master copies, and don't make any more changes to them. I didn't run them through Google Translate because GT often garbles the information and translates things inconsistently. I use a Unix 'sed' script to replace Japanese words and phrases in the JCE with the correct English translations, writing the translated files to a different folder so that my master copies remain untouched. The script consists of lines that look like this: :s/武人の靴/ Combatant Boots /g This means "replace all occurrences of '武人の靴' with ' Combatant Boots '". (Japanese is written without spaces, so I have to add spaces around the English words.) The Japanese - English translation page gave me some translations to start with, and I was able to add armours, weapons, NPCs, collectables, materials, quests, etc by matching up the English names from the wiki's lists and UB's Translation Notes with those on the JCE. After that I had to start looking up words individually on Google Translate and Jim Breen's WWWJDIC to get a rough translation and figuring out what it is in the English version of the game. I run the script once in a while to retranslate the JCE pages. Many of the pages are now translated enough that I can use them to look up information, like checking quest prerequisites on the wiki against those in the JCE, or finding the exact map coordinates of the spawn point for a monster or collectable. (When I have time to experiment with Wiki Maps, I hope to use the JCE's data to mark the locations on the maps.) Lately I've been focusing on translating all the enemies' arts. That's proving to be a lot more work because most of them aren't on the wiki, and I've found that some of the ones on the wiki are incorrect. So the only way I can be sure of the correct translation is by seeing an enemy use that art, and comparing its name and effects to the arts listed for that enemy in the JCE. That's not as easy as it sounds; the party has to be strong enough to survive a prolonged battle, but not so strong that the monster can't hit them because then it won't be able to fill its talent gauge. Another difficulty is that the art name is shown for only a few seconds, and only if I have that enemy targeted. I have to watch for the red sparkle that indicates an enemy is about to use an art, quickly target that enemy, and press the pause key when the art name appears so I can copy it down. (It's too easy to misread or misremember the art name; it's much safer to have it frozen on the screen while I type.) If I were playing on my Wii or Wii U instead of Dolphin, I'd have to record my play sessions for later review and use freeze-frame to read the art names. So far I've managed to translate 505 of the 691 enemy arts, and I have tentative translations (read: wild guesses) for the remaining 186. I don't plan on posting the entire translated JCE, but I think it'd be useful to post the arts tables in my userspace in case anyone else wants to help check the remaining arts. When the enemies' arts are translated -- or perhaps sooner -- I want to write a Lua-based template to display a specific enemy's talent arts table using the JCE data, similar to what I did for Armour Recognition. It should make it much easier to add the arts to all the enemies' pages. UPDATE: I've posted the mostly-translated Enemy Arts tables at User:Flanqer/Enemy Arts. Category:Blog posts